Post Fire Regrowth

[CBee]

I found my recent offtrack outings fairly overgrown in SEQ. But mainly in gullies and south sides of mountains/hills. The ridges and north aspects are overgrown but still easy going. I also found a massive amounts of Gympie-Gympie, compared to the last 20 years.

[Happy Pirate]

The east coast fires were 2020. In the first year or so afterward, walking was easy in many places as the scrub was burnt. By 2021, the bush was regrowing really thickly and I had trips where my clothes were ripped to shreds (literally) and my pace was about 1 km per hour. Since then, things may have got worse, I think, certainly not better. The regrowth that was waist high is now 3 metres high and progress is made by tunneling through like a rabid wombat. Sometimes even managing a kilometre an hour is actually fast.

What are people's opinions on when the forests will return to more open large trees with minimal understory? Will it be decades? Will it be never? Are some tracks gone for good? Some areas got very little traffic before the fires and probably much less now; after all, who actually enjoys bashing through at a km/hour as your clothes get shredded?

There are not many reports on the forums here, but what reports there are talk about pretty rough conditions on routes that were passable before the fires.

Interested in any and all opinions.

It varies of course from ecosystem to ecosystem but the disturbance coloniser species such as Acacia and Pomaderis are fairly short lived by ecosystem standards, typically 30 - 50 years. What seems like a long time to us is a very short time ecologically and the constant attempt to 'clear' the understory by burning shows a very short-term mindset towards ecological management that humans haven't learnt to think beyond yet.
Unfortunately many of us won't live to see those places return to an older growth state and so we have to cut and clear and maintain tracks the best we can.

[rcaffin]

Tried to cross a small gully last week, in general Hornsby region (local). Probably only 1 km between ridges.
Gave up before we got to the bottom. The jungle was fierce!
But actually what really stopped us was the solid cliff line which we could not explore sideways because of the scrub.
Plus the high probability that the other side was worse, with bigger cliffs.
Maybe being 78 was part of it?

Cheers
Roger

[sandym]

Mate, if I'm still out there whacking around at 78, I'll be pretty stoked!